Leadership development for all nurses: it is time

This week’s blog focuses on leadership development and is led by Katarzyna (Kasia) Czabanowska, Prof., Dr. @KatarzynaCzaba1, Emily McWhirter, PhD, RN @McWhirterEmily, and Barbara Stilwell, PhD, MSC, FRCN, FAAN @bathebrit

Nurses and midwives make up 50% of the world’s health workforce, but are significantly underrepresented in senior management positions¹. To deal with this long-standing problem, we sought to develop a framework of future-oriented leadership competencies based on evidence of worldwide accepted effectiveness. This was done through a multi-step research and review process over two years, with support from the Johnson & Johnson Foundation and in collaboration with representatives from global nursing organizations and universities, under the leadership of Sigma Theta Tau International Honorary Nursing Society (Sigma).

With the support of a master’s-prepared librarian, the literature search identified any leadership frameworks in health care and health-related areas that had been tested for evidence of effectiveness. Surprisingly (to us, the core team and the authors of this blog), only 26 articles based on evidence quite than expert opinion were present in the healthcare leadership literature. 26 articles were further reviewed and ten were deemed relevant to this work and offering a competency-based framework. Frameworks underpinning the work got here from nursing and other healthcare fields, including leadership frameworks from various countries. Of those ten articles, three were related to nursing and the remainder were related to health care professions basically. Two of them were developed for global use, while the others were developed and used on the national level. We used ten articles to discover broad categories they shared that were each forward-looking and applicable to nursing leadership in a modified world after the Covid-19 pandemic. Similar topics were grouped and identified into seven domains: strategy for leading self and others, collaboration, communication, transformation and alter, management, skilled ethics and evidence-based decision-making.

We identified other areas that we felt were key for nurse leaders and called them lenses. Lenses are a perspective through which you’ll have a look at the next domains: diversity and inclusion, political wisdom, and systems pondering. They supply future orientation in additional traditional areas of leadership as they address emerging issues central to the event of health care systems and, subsequently, to nursing because the occupation deals with contemporary health issues². Healthcare staff should have leadership skills that help them effectively address these challenges to enhance the health and well-being of the patients, communities and societies they serve³.

We then developed competencies for every domain and lens and asked a gaggle of 14 material experts (SMEs), chosen from global nursing organizations, nursing higher education institutions, and high-level clinical practice settings, to rate their relevance and validity. SMEs provided invaluable feedback on wording, accuracy and categorization. We asked each SME to recommend five other colleagues review the revised competencies. Two rounds of the Delphi survey provided us with further feedback from a really global group. Some words were modified to make the competencies more comprehensible to non-English speakers, and there was debate about their usefulness. Nevertheless, all of this provided worthwhile feedback to the core team and the consultation process was one of the crucial exciting phases of development. After one other round of revisions by the core team based on Delphi feedback, the core team provided behavioral metrics for every competency at 4 levels: novice, competent, expert, and luminary.

Currently, Global framework for nurse leadership competencies is being tested. The intention is for it to develop into and remain a living document and to be improved based on user feedback. To make sure the platform’s global reach, it is accessible in eight (8) languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. The leadership competency framework may be found here (www.sigmanursing.org/gnlcf). The framework is free for each nurse all over the world, and we’re asking to your feedback to assist it develop into a living document and construct our understanding of leadership.

This framework may be used for self-assessment by individual nurses, organizations and schools of nursing as they develop or revise their leadership programs, and by employers to support the leadership development of their employees. The Leadership Competencies Framework offers an evidence-based approach that may help nurses all over the world develop the talents and confidence needed to develop into compassionate, thoughtful and progressive leaders and make worthwhile contributions to our global commitment to universal health care. It is time for nurses to take responsibility for leadership development because our contributions are needed greater than ever. We look ahead to seeing how much we are able to achieve along with effective and competent leadership.

Bibliography

1. WHO Expert Committee on Nursing: Third Report. Geneva: World Health Organization; 1954:4 (WHO Technical Report Series, No. 91). https://iris.who.int/handle/10665/39846
2. UHL health care staff (2020). The state of nursing on this planet. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240003279
3. PubMed Google Scholar Rodriguez-Feria P, Czabanowska K, Babich S, Rodriguez-Sanchez D, Carreño Hernandez FL, and Hernandez Florez LJ (2023). Public Health Fr. Dr. 44:1605806. https://doi.org/10.3389/phrs.2023.1605806

This blog is a component of a series produced in collaboration with the International Health Professionals Network Home page | International Health Skilled Education Network (inhwe.org)

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